Hollywood Nervous About Kagan's Fair Use Views

Of the many commentaries and analyses springing up about Obama's Supreme Court nominee, this community might be most interested in one from the Hollywood Reporter. Reader Hugh Pickens notes that Hollywood may have reason to be nervous about the nomination of Elena Kagan to be the next US Supreme Court justice. "As dean of Harvard Law School from 2003 to 2009, Kagan was instrumental in beefing up the school's Berkman Center for Internet & Society by recruiting Lawrence Lessig and others who take a strongly liberal position on fair use in copyright disputes. And Kagan got an opportunity to showcase her feelings on intellectual property when the US Supreme Court asked her, as US Solicitor General, to weigh in on the big Cablevision case. 'After Cablevision announced in 2006 that it would allow subscribers to store TV programs on the cable operator's computer servers instead of on a hard-top box, Hollywood studios went nuts, predicting that the days of licensing on-demand content would be over,' writes Gardner. Kagan's brief compared remote-storage DVRs to VCRs (PDF), brought up the Sony/Betamax case, and lightly slapped Cablevision on the wrist for not making fair use a bigger issue. 'It sounds to us like Kagan would love the Court to determine when customers have a fair-use right to copy, which should cheer those on the copy-left at the EFF, and worry many in the entertainment industry.' On the minus side, Kagan has surrounded herself with entertainment industry advocates in the Justice Department."

Comments

Re:Good

[radtea]

I presume neither party would like bin Laden

I dunno... they both are using him as an excuse for the largest power grab and rights-trampling stampede in American history.

The US government is currently in the process of pre-trial hearings for an illegally detained child soldier in Guantanomo Bay, which demonstrates the New American Empire's power to ignore the American constitution whenever it feels like it. And the illegally detained child soldier is a native-born Canadian citizen, so it is pretty clear that the New American Empire intends to extend its power across the world whenever it feels like it.

PJ O'Rourke said that giving money and power to politicians is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys, and bin Laden's actions have resulted in the oligarchs of the New American Empire being given a whole lot of both. They and bin Laden (and other Islamist nutjobs) are the only people who actually benefit from the "War on Terror", and they are effectively colluding together to maintain it[*]
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[*] Although there is almost certainly no actual collusion involved--it is just that the natural intent of both groups, the Islamist nutjobs on the one hand and the oligarchs of the New American Empire on the other are aligned in their mutual opposition. It takes two to make a war, and the leadership of both sides are extremely interested in maintaining the war at all costs, right down to the last drop of someone else's blood...